The overall quality of service has become increasingly important when providing telecommunication services. Therefore, cellular network operators need to manage their quality issues proactively in order to avoid or at least reduce the amount of customer complaints. Network operators whom have lower quality of service compared to their market peers may in some cases experience a loss of subscribers also known as churn rate. One reason may be that subscribers to a greater extent consider changing service provider if the perceived quality is below expectations. High churn rate is naturally having a negative effect on the profitability of the network operator due to the loss of revenue and costs associated with attracting new subscribers to replace the lost ones.
One way to measure perceived quality in a network is to measure the quality of connection establishments in a cell which is associated to a network node. As schematically illustrated in FIG. 1, terminals 110,111,112 may be present and establishing connections in one or more cells associated with one or more network nodes 100a, 100b. The network nodes 100a, 100b are normally arranged in connection to a radio network 100 and core network 101. If a terminal 110,111 or 112 experiences a lost connection the event may be reported and registered to the core network 101.
Parameters which are commonly measured to indicate the perceived quality of network operators' service, is the connection quality in terms of accessibility and retainability. Accessibility is normally the capability to establish the connection between a terminal and a network node while retainability normally means the capability to retain the connection once it is initiated. If a network node 100a, 100b is indicated to be malfunctioning, the network operator maintenance may, by using performance management, allocate resources to adjust and repair the network node in order to increase the perceived quality in the cells. A post processing system 105 may, according to one example, run tests on the network nodes 100a, 100b and the core network 101 in order to determine whether or not the terminals in the cells associated with the network node 100a, 100b are experiencing quality deficiencies. For example, the post processing system may identify certain network nodes having a higher occurrence of unsuccessful connection establishment and dropped connections than other network nodes.
A more reactive way to identify, for example, areas, cells or nodes having poor quality is to measure and monitor customer support feedback and complaints. The initiative then needs to be taken by the subscriber. This reactive indication may in some cases have a poor effect in decreasing churn rate.
It is, however, not possible to measure perceived quality per user when applying the above mentioned techniques for quality measurement. Although the network operators and service providers continuously monitor their network to detect inferior or malfunctioning network nodes, quality problems still exit due to reasons which are not necessarily related to the malfunction of nodes and components of cellular network.